The Fowler Family Business (16 page)

Henry ran an eye over the silver-framed family photographs on the desk. The Savage-Smith children were animal lovers: they bestrode ponies and stroked labradors – experiences which had been denied to Henry’s family because of Naomi’s distaste for quadrupeds, their smell, their moult, their feed. There were group portraits at christenings: Henry’s children had not been baptised, nor, reciprocally, had they been bar mitzvahed. Here were the Savage-Smiths at one of their daughters’ weddings. That’ll come soon for Ben and Lennie, Henry thought fondly, smiling to himself about how quickly they’d grown up, wondering how he’d get on with their respective partners. He feared the prospect of being a grandfather but knew equally that he’d take pride in that status. He hoped that his parents would live long enough to see their great-grandchildren. Four generations of Fowler in a silver frame – now that will be something to celebrate.

‘This—’ Mr Savage-Smith cleared his throat: ‘This is difficult …’ He clenched his hands as though at prayer.

What a performance!

Henry was due later that afternoon to see a client, a Miss Moodyson, a septuagenarian spinster whose brusqueness and rudeness to him were inexcusable despite her having lost both parents (ninety-seven and ninety-nine) within three days of each other. It’s often the way, it’s the shock at the first’s fatal stroke that does for the second. Her manner at their previous meeting had been condescending, she had evidently been under the illusion that she was addressing a tradesman. Henry would borrow from Mr Savage-Smith, he would treat her to a magisterial display of professionalism. He felt inspired.

‘You’re married … Ah, what’s that, twenty-four years.’ His delivery as he read from a file was slow as if resolving a conundrum, as if speaking to himself. ‘Good innings nowadays,’ he added in a smiley aside, actually addressing Henry. ‘And two children … seventeen, sixteen … Uhmm. What did you, ah,
do
about the children? If I can put it that way.’

Henry pulled a face of bafflement, regarded him askew: ‘Sorry but you’ve lost me there. I’m not quite with you.’

‘I’m loath to invoke our friends the shrinks … the chippy brigade. Trouble with most of them is they neglected the Airfix side of their development: you’ll never be a surgeon if you couldn’t glue models. Yah? Still, they may be on to something with this notion that, how shall I put it, that a continued appetite in middle life is dependent on fecundity in youth … comparative youth. Of course there’s no absolute proof of a causal link, never is with Jimmy Shrink … But circumstantial … Thing is I suppose
we
have tended to overlook the possibility that infertility and impotence could be connected simply because they’re so routinely connected by the layman.’ He spoke the word ‘layman’ with an amused sneer.

Henry nodded complicitly to signal that he, too, knew all about laymen a.k.a. the non-professionals, a.k.a. the pitifully uninitiated who demand to be led like lambs.

‘The new thinking on this one’s if a chap’s conscious of his infertility or a low sperm count it acts as an inhibitor. One’s touching here in a way on … on very big questions. What are we for? And the answer that our bodies seem to give us is that we’re for reproduction. And if we don’t reproduce our generative equipment takes industrial inaction, ha! Bit of a conundrum … If we don’t do our bit to increase the human race then it looks as though we’re supposed to forfeit the pleasures of sex – that’s the message I’m afraid. Not a very cheering one. Especially not for the gay tendency: astonishing the incidence of impotence in middle-aged homosexuals – they’re not necessarily infertile of course but they’re pretty much all childless, goes without saying. Electively childless … which is different. Haven’t reproduced by choice.’

‘I’m not homosexual. Never have been. And I wouldn’t describe … I mean it’s not impotence … not
per se,
nowhere near. Not actual—’

‘Course not. Course not. Appreciate that. What I’m suggesting is that your condition – I must say you’ve done jolly well to spot it, nip it in the bud. Early bird! Ah? It’s nothing that InterVene can’t sort out p.d.q. Indeed yours is
precisely
the sort of case it’s intended to treat. Childless … Symptoms of prospective impotence in middle life – hints at what’s to come. Eh?’

‘Yes …?’ Henry was ever more bemused. ‘But I’m not childless. I’ve got two children. Like you said. Sixteen and seventeen.’

‘Young adults … Their maturation, becoming sexual beings themselves – it’s just the thing to set off the sense of inadequacy which manifests in partial impotence.’

‘I don’t feel inadequate,’ replied Henry, stiffly.

Mr Savage-Smith smiled: ‘Of course you don’t. The children. Boys? Girls?’

‘One of each.’

‘There you are then. They’re getting to the age when they’re going to reproduce and – well it’s like a worm isn’t it? Working away at you, that knowledge. Their generative capability is going to be a reproach to their adoptive father. Going to make him feel inadequate that he couldn’t have children of his own.’

Henry shook his head long-sufferingly. He laughed. ‘No. No, I’m not their
adoptive
father. I think you’ve got your files in a twist.’

‘Ah … Ah, so you took the donor route. Heavens – that makes you something of a pioneer in …’ He scanned the file: ‘What? ’75?’

‘I don’t quite … This donor route. How’s that relevant? They’re our children. Our own – they’re not adopted. There weren’t donors involved. I don’t … I think there must be … It’s probably a computer error. Usually is.’ Henry grinned reassuringly.

The grin dissipated as he witnessed Mr Savage-Smith’s aghast reaction. The consultant seemed to be suffering a turn. He cradled his forehead, covered his eyes. Then he worriedly studied the window – four panes, one so warped that the house opposite was all bendy bricks and vorticist cornice. He distractedly chewed the ball of his right thumb. He scrutinised Henry as though he had never seen him before. He was looking at a different man, at a man whose life he was about to change for ever, who was gaping at him with an inquisitive show of filled teeth. He fixed him eye to eye. He spoke slowly and warily with no attempt to dissemble either his shock or the gravity of what he had to impart.

He could have spared Henry Fowler. Another consultant – Mr Gervaise Bassett, perhaps – might have allowed the man to live on in ignorance, in the comfort of his lie. Mr Savage-Smith didn’t hesitate. He took a momentous moral decision in a split second, in the conviction that to have evaded it would have been a hippocratic dereliction which he could never have forgiven in himself.

‘Mr Fowler, there’s no easy way to put this. You are infertile.’

Henry’s disbelieving laugh was an articulated wince.

‘I hadn’t realised,’ continued Mr Savage-Smith, ‘you weren’t apprised of—’

‘Ridiculous. It’s … What … What are you basing it on? Infert—’

‘The test results are unequivocal I’m afraid … The samples you deposited—’

‘They’ll have mixed them up. They do it with babies. Do it all the time. You can’t pick up a paper without some … If they can do it with babies they’re not going to have any problem doing it with specimen jars are they?’

‘I only wish there had been a mistake – but they’re fail-safe, our procedures. Samples are split, they go to two laboratories, independent, no contact between them.’

‘Tell me this …’ Henry repeatedly jabbed a finger. He swallowed before he could speak again. There was a lachrymose catch in his voice. ‘How many infertile men … do you know … who’ve got two children?’ He stared at Mr Savage-Smith whose face was obscured by his hands. Was the man trying to hide? ‘Two children. How can I be infertile?’ He was accusing. He was pleading. Mostly he was pleading.

Mr Savage-Smith’s sympathy was engaged. He murmured through clasped hands: ‘Ah, perhaps … perhaps you should have a talk with your wife.’

The scissors glimmer in Henry Fowler’s hand.

The nocturnal city’s penumbra seeps through uncurtained windows. He steals through this house which is his house, which he knows so well, which is a history of more than a quarter of his life: here’s the parquet tile which clicks even when stepped on softly; here’s the stair-rod with the kink which wasn’t there one day and was the next; here are the prints of oasts and elms at the turn of the stairs; and here, invisible because of reflective glass, is the hand-coloured, yard-long photograph of the Crystal Palace.

He opens the door of Leonora’s room, a door he used to open on all fours as Barry the Bear, roaring, when she was little, when she was a lost princess squirming with delighted fright. He used to open it as Thargul the Kreblonite when she was the doomed space maiden Zurgtrene. He was her father then. He longs to be her father still: he is her father, surely. The bedroom admits no light. He closes his eyes to prepare them for the solid blackness. Lennie insists on blinds and lined cutains. She smells the way young girls will, of warm laundry and newly baked biscuit, of downy skin and chewing-gum. Her breath fills the room. It guides him to her. He moves gingerly. As his eyes adjust to the darkness he begins to discern the disposition of her body beneath the single sheet’s pleats and folds. These are the soft contours of her shoulder. She lies diagonally across the bed, almost prone. How tall she has grown, a stretch-Naomi, fine and equine, long limbed with her mane of chestnut hair sweeping across the pillow as though fixed by a head wind. He looks down on her with a love that’s unconditional even though its very foundation is in question. His grief numbs him. He stares at her and wonders – who are you?

Clenching his teeth in anxiety lest a cracking joint betray him Henry Fowler squats beside the bed, clutching the scissors. He fears that his balance is impaired so he slides his right leg behind him, kneels on that knee in a pose suggestive of chivalry. He lifts her thick hair from her pillow with his left hand, resisting all temptation to stroke it, grips a hank between thumb and forefinger, manoeuvres himself wrigglingly on the carpet, lifts the scissors and cuts. He puts them into his pocket and takes from it an envelope in to which he slides the lock of hair. And as Lennie stirs, murmuring in her sleep, Henry creeps from her room. He closes the door, sweeps his brow with his cuff, seals the envelope with what meagre spittle his dry mouth will yield, replaces it in his pocket and, a thief in the night, tiptoes away. He hears Naomi’s car draw up outside.

There’s that old familiar screech when she clumsily engages reverse as an auxiliary brake. It still brings a smile to his face, the way she can never get the hang of it, it still has him shaking his head in a pipe-and-carpet-slippers way, fondly.

‘Ooh. What a …’ Naomi sighed as she dumped her bag on a chair beside the kitchen table. ‘How are you?’ she asked Henry who sat at it pretending engrossment in the new edition of
The Right Box.

‘OK,’ he lied, ‘all right. Yeah.’

‘I had to play with Sheila. Wuss – she’s so
timid …
No sense of adventure. Never taken a risk in her life. Still, I made a small slam – hearts. No thanks to her.’

‘Well done.’

‘I’m going to – d’you want a Cointreau or something? B and B?’

Without waiting for his reply she walked from the room. Then her head reappeared round the door jamb: ’Oh ‘fore I forget – They’ve asked Ben to stay on … That’s good isn’t it. He’s going to come back after the weekend. Is that all right with you?’

Henry raised his shoulders noncommittally and spread wide his palms, in one of his now unselfconscious ‘Jew-ish’ gestures. He cursed silently. She walked through to the dining-room where she kept an ebony-and-ormolu-effect trolley loaded with sweet liquors of the world. She raised her voice: ‘I did ring. At about four. But Horse Face said you were out.’

He heard the chink of sculpturally extravagant bottles.

‘Mistuh Foalher hez en h’ppointment,’ she exaggerated Mrs Grusting’s parade-ground enunciation. ‘Did you?’ she yelled.

‘Did I what, love?’ He heard himself call her love. It formed on his tongue without his leave, exited his mouth before he could stop it.

‘Have an appointment at four o’clock. I never know with her. She might just be being difficult.’

‘Yes. I did.’

He had had an appointment at four o’clock with Dai Turnbull who had overcome the handicaps of a facial lupus the size of a fist, a fluting voice, two aborted corruption inquiries, a dismissed charge of causing death by dangerous driving, a dismissed sexual-harassment suit and perennial alcoholism to achieve the rank of Detective Chief Superintendent.

Dai’s catch-phrase was ‘never kick a nigger … till he’s down’: he was a legend for the way he extended the pause. It had made him a sought-after after-dinner speaker on the South London circuit because, as every Rotarian, Lion and Mason agreed, the Super after-dinner spoke as he found.

They met in a not-very-French café in Upper Norwood where Gordon the owner knew better than to present Turnbull with a bill, and the waitresses in horizontally striped tops knew better than to complain about Turnbull’s octopus hands. Hands which when Henry arrived were occupied tearing up a cake and dipping the pieces into a stiffly corrected coffee.

They small-talked:

‘How’s the lad then Henry?’

‘He’s at Solihull this week.’

‘Shacken are son goo.’

‘No. The N.S.R…. whatsit. Centre of Excellence – for squash …’

‘Oh that’s right yeah. Yeah, remember he was a bit of a player. Course his mum was—’